Institutionalizing Imagination

How arts organizations can build research and development capacity

Author: Elizabeth Helgeson

Arts organizations know how to protect the work that must happen next: the coming season, the next production, the fundraising deadline, the board meeting. What they rarely protect is work whose outcome is still unknown. Experimentation, horizon scanning, and the patient development of new models are pushed behind more immediate demands. Under pressure, today repeatedly defeats tomorrow.

Over time, this pattern narrows the organization’s capacity to change. When an organization cannot preserve what it has learned or test what it may need next, its future is shaped by accumulated defaults. Programs continue because they already exist. Revenue models are refined instead of reconsidered. Promising experiments remain isolated in one department or disappear when a staff member leaves.

The cultural sector has no shortage of imagination. Its structural weakness is that imagination is often treated as an individual quality rather than an institutional capability. The work exists, yet it is rarely named, funded, documented, or governed in a way that allows it to compound.

Research and development offers a useful frame. The OECD’s Frascati Manual defines R&D as creative and systematic work undertaken to increase knowledge and develop new applications. It identifies five qualities: the work is novel, creative, uncertain in outcome, systematic, and capable of producing transferable or reproducible results. None of those qualities requires a laboratory or a billion-dollar budget. In an arts organization, they could describe a new audience model, a prototype for digital programming, a different approach to fundraising, or a deliberate test of how artistic work might serve a changing community.

The important shift is from occasional experimentation to retained capability. Three organizations in very different fields show what that shift requires: disciplined decisions, shared methods, and an institutional home that gives uncertain work both protection and standing.

Deciding Under Uncertainty

At AbbVie, research and development sits at the center of the business. The scale is far removed from most arts organizations, yet the operating logic is highly relevant because pharmaceutical development combines long horizons, high failure rates, regulation, competition, and irreversible risk.

In an interview conducted for this case study, Andreia Lee, Associate Director of Search and Evaluation at AbbVie, described a system that surfaces uncertainty before additional resources are committed. A Target Product Profile defines the qualities a potential drug must have before investment begins. Risks are assessed across program, regulatory, and commercial categories, while stage gates determine whether a candidate should proceed. Projects that no longer meet the required standard are stopped early, freeing capital and staff attention for stronger candidates.

The rigor extends beyond internal development. Lee’s team scans smaller companies and external research, allowing AbbVie to invest in promising assets after evidence has begun to emerge. Competitive intelligence, clinical advisers, and regulatory expectations are built into the process. The organization does not wait until the end to discover its binding constraint. It reasons backward from the conditions that any successful result will eventually have to meet.

For arts organizations, the transferable lesson is to separate loyalty to a mission from loyalty to a particular program. Scarcity makes that distinction more important. Limited resources often remain attached to projects because stopping them feels like an admission of failure, even when the original purpose could be served more effectively another way. A clear profile, agreed criteria, and scheduled decision gates make continuation a decision rather than a habit.

Teaching People to Work With Ambiguity

Stanford’s d.school addresses a different problem: how to make imaginative practice teachable. Its premise is that creative capacity grows through methods, repetition, and permission. Sarah Stein Greenberg, the school’s Executive Director, described the structure as a landing pad for creative work. Too little structure leaves people unsure where to begin. Too much can close the space in which an unexpected answer might emerge.

The school’s pedagogy adjusts that balance over time. Early projects are tightly scaffolded. Later ones give students far more responsibility for defining the problem and the route through it. Several short cycles can build judgment faster than a single extended project because participants experience the full sequence of generating, testing, receiving feedback, and trying again. Shared language also helps teams distinguish divergent work, when possibilities are opened, from convergent work, when choices are evaluated.

The d.school’s own experience shows how fragile experimental space can be. Stein Greenberg recalled a pop-up class series intended to move faster than the annual course cycle. As the d.school’s reputation grew, participants arrived expecting every offering to be exceptional. That expectation made instructors and students less willing to take visible risks, and the series was eventually discontinued. Prestige had raised the cost of an unfinished idea.

Arts organizations face the same danger. Public excellence is essential to their legitimacy, yet the standards appropriate to a premiere or exhibition can suffocate development work. Organizations need spaces where ideas can be incomplete, feedback is expected, and a weak prototype creates information rather than embarrassment. The quality of the eventual public result depends on protecting this less polished stage.

Giving Cultural Inquiry Institutional Standing

The Culture and Civil Society Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School offers a third model. Housed within a school of government, the initiative examines culture as both a way to understand civic life and a means of shaping it. Its position matters. Cultural arguments that struggle to travel beyond arts institutions gain a different audience when they enter a setting associated with policy and public leadership.

Program Director Jenn Chang described an initiative still building its methods and evidence. Before a 2025 convening, the team interviewed roughly forty arts and culture leaders and used those conversations to shape a gathering of about sixty participants. One finding was the depth of fragmentation within the sector: organizations working in the same city may not see themselves as part of a common field. Chang connected that fragmentation to a scarcity reflex in which information becomes something to protect rather than a resource to share.

Her response is deliberately catalytic. The initiative aims to seed principles, convene people, and allow useful work to live with others. That creates a real funding tension. Donors often want visible, attributable outputs, while catalytic value may appear in relationships, decisions, and resources that another organization ultimately owns. The initiative must therefore develop ways to demonstrate influence without centering itself in every result.

This case reveals another requirement of R&D capacity: the work needs a credible home. Placement shapes who will listen, which resources become available, and whether the inquiry is treated as central or peripheral. For a cultural organization, that does not automatically mean creating a separate department. It does mean assigning ownership, access to leadership, a recurring budget, and a path by which findings can affect decisions.

A Practical Architecture for Cultural R&D

Taken together, the three cases suggest that institutionalizing imagination is an operating design challenge. Five practices can create a workable starting point.

Name the work already happening. Most arts organizations already conduct small experiments, informal audience research, program reviews, or scenario discussions. An initial inventory can identify which activities genuinely seek new knowledge and which are routine improvements. Naming them as applied research or development makes them easier to compare, resource, and retain.

Define the question before funding the answer. A simplified version of AbbVie’s Target Product Profile can clarify what an experiment must reveal. What problem are we trying to understand? For whom? What evidence would justify further investment? What constraint could stop the project? What will we know at the end that we do not know now? These questions reduce the risk that enthusiasm becomes the only success criterion.

Create decision gates. Every experiment should have moments when leaders choose to continue, adapt, pause, or stop. The criteria need to be established early, while the organization can still evaluate the work with some distance. A stop decision should produce a brief account of what was learned and release the remaining resources. That is how failure becomes useful and affordable.
Build repeated, low-stakes cycles. Teams develop tolerance for ambiguity by moving through the process more than once. Small prototypes, short research sprints, and contained pilots create more learning opportunities than one oversized innovation project carrying unrealistic expectations. Generative work and evaluative work should also be separated in time so that judgment does not shut down possibility before it has developed.

Make the learning travel. An experiment becomes institutional capacity when someone beyond the original team can use what it produced. A short record should capture the question, method, evidence, decision, and implications. Leadership must also decide where these records live, who reviews them across departments, and when accumulated learning enters planning and budgeting.

These practices require protected time, modest funding, and visible sponsorship. They also require external scanning. AbbVie watches competitors and regulators. The d.school responds to changing forms of work and technology. The Harvard initiative listens across institutions and civic domains. Cultural organizations need an equivalent discipline for noticing shifts in communities, artistic practice, policy, technology, philanthropy, and public behavior before those shifts become emergencies.

Starting With One Question

I saw the value of anticipatory capacity at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center after the March 2020 shutdown. CMS had invested in media capability and built a deep catalogue of recorded performances before a global crisis made those assets essential. When venues closed, the organization could remain present and begin producing work for digital space. What looked like resilience in the crisis had been built through decisions made well before it.

The same principle can be tested incrementally inside a large institution such as the New York Philharmonic. The realistic first step is to identify work that is already experimental and give it a clearer structure. One department might test a fundraising prototype. Another might use audience focus groups to pressure-test a programming assumption. Each project would begin with a defined question, proceed through a few decision gates, and end with a record of what changed as a result.

If those experiments earn their keep, the work can become a recurring budget category and eventually an integrated function. Its value will depend on providing a dependable way to turn uncertainty into knowledge and knowledge into better choices, without creating innovation theatre or unnecessary bureaucracy.

Arts organizations have spent centuries cultivating imagination, interpretation, and the rehearsal of possible futures. Their challenge now is organizational: building conditions in which those capacities can inform how the institution itself evolves. A tradition remains alive because each generation works on it, tests it, and carries it forward. Protecting that work is part of preservation, and it is how an organization earns the future it hopes to inhabit.

Research Note

This article draws on interviews conducted by the author with Andreia Lee, Associate Director of Search and Evaluation at AbbVie; Sarah Stein Greenberg, Executive Director of Stanford’s d.school; and Jenn Chang, Program Director of the Culture and Civil Society Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School. The wider inquiry also included conversations with practitioners in the arts, technology, and editorial fields.

Selected Sources

• OECD, Frascati Manual 2015
• AbbVie 2024 Annual Report on Form 10-K
• Stanford d.school
• Harvard Kennedy School Center for Public Leadership

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